Renowned children’s book illustrator, Kadir Nelson, spoke at KPL’s 31st Children's Literature Seminar last month. He told his audience that some of his illustrations derive from childhood memories, and he always strives to tell the truth. That’s what readers want, he said.

This narrow margin between truth and lies is just one of the boundaries the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chabon addresses in his musings about the writers’ craft. Chabon testifies that interesting and entertaining writing requires the creator to cross borders, venture into new zones, or skitter around the edges of convention. He extols genre fiction---fantasy, science fiction, graphic novels, ghost stories, etc. and celebrates the use of quirky character devices, such as golems, tricksters, and daemons. He even employs the book’s physical form to reinforce his unique literary views. The beautifully designed jacket doesn’t wrap the entire cover and its inside flaps are void of words and the author’s acknowledgements are laid out visually as a map with legend.

Chabon’s penchant for the extraordinary started in 1969 when his family joined a smattering of colonists as residents of Columbia, MD, one of the country’s planned, utopian communities. In the title essay, Maps and Legends, Chabon declares that moving “into the midst of that unfinished, ongoing act of imagination set the course of my life.” For a acollege urban studies class in the late sixties, I wrote a paper about Columbia and other "new towns." If only I'd had this mesmorizing essay as a resource.